Fashioning Diaspora Space: Moving Patterns

Deconstructing ‘The Grammar of Ornament'

Owen Jones’s nineteenth century pattern collection, ‘The Grammar of Ornament’, sets out small squares and rectangles of pattern from other cultures, torn from their contexts, in stable, symmetrical arrangements, as though they were specimens in a museum cabinet. This work shreds and tangles some pages of The Grammar of Ornament, undoing Jones’s imposed symmetries and implying a more unruly mass of material whose connections go in all directions.